The Average Email Open Rates By Industry Standards

The Average Email Open Rates By Industry Standards

You might have heard the term “open rate”. But what exactly does it mean?

Today we are going to talk about what an open rate is, what open rate you should aim for, and what are the average open rates in various industries.

What Is an Email Open Rate?

What Is an Email Open Rate?

An open rate is an email marketing metric that shows what percentage of your email subscribers have opened a particular email.

Say, if you have 100 subscribers and 20 of them open your email, your open rate for that email would be 20%.

There are two formulas you can use to calculate it.

Here’s the less precise one:

Open rate = (Emails opened/Emails sent) x 100

For example:

Let’s say you have 1789 subscribers, 367 of which opened your latest email. What would be its open rate?

(367/1789) x 100 = 20.51%

And here’s the more precise formula that accounts for the bounce rate:

Open rate = (Emails opened/(Emails sent – Emails bounced)) x 100

For example:

Let’s say you have 1789 subscribers, 367 of which opened your latest email. However, 29 subscribers didn’t get the email because it bounced. What would be the open rate then?

(367/(1789-29)) x 100 = 20.85%

As you can see, the difference between the less precise open rate and the more precise open rate is extremely small, 0.34% in this case.

That’s to be expected because bounce rates tend to be extremely low, typically less than 1%, so accounting for the bounce rate doesn’t change the open rate much.

However, the larger your email list, the more important precision becomes.

For example:

Let’s say you have 1,000,000 email subscribers, 100,000 of which opened your latest email. Meanwhile, 1,000 of them didn’t get the email because it bounced.

With the less precise formula, you get an open rate of 10%:

(100,000/1,000,000) x 100= 10%.

With the more precise formula, you get an open rate of 10.01%:

(100,000/(1,000,000 – 1,000)) x 100 = 10.01%

As you can see, the difference between the less precise open rate and the more precise open rate is just 0.1%.

But we are dealing with large numbers here so that 0.1% means 100 email opens, which isn’t as small a margin of error as it might seem at first glance.

All that being said, while it’s important to understand how open rates are calculated, you probably won’t ever have to do it manually – email marketing apps will do it for you automatically.

What Open Rate Should You Aim For?

So what open rate should you aim for when it comes to email marketing?

In 2022, MailerLite analyzed data from over 40,000 approved MailerLite customer accounts based in USA, Canada, and the UK.

The eventual dataset included over 1 million campaigns that were sent to more than 10 recipients.

Here are the email marketing benchmarks that this research has established:

  • Average open rate: 37.65%
  • Average click rate: 3.36%
  • Average click-through rate (CTR): 8.93%
  • Average unsubscribe rate: 0.24%
  • Average bounce rate: 0.30%

As you can see, the average open rate is 37.65%, but it would be a mistake to use that number as your benchmark because open rates vary between industries.

That’s why it’s so important to know what is the average email open rate in your industry.

Average Email Open Rates by Industry

Here’s the MailerLite breakdown of open rates by industry:

IndustryOpen Rate
Agency35.46%
Agriculture and Food Services42.90%
Animal Care and Veterinary45.84%
Architecture and Construction39.82%
Artist44.88%
Art Gallery and Museum45.69%
Arts and Artists37.23%
Automotive42.71%
Author33.73%
Beauty and Personal Care39.89%
Blogger42.23%
Business and Finance36.49%
Computers and Electronics39.98%
Construction33.85%
Consulting36.89%
Creative Services/Agency39.98%
E-commerce36.59%
Educational Institution35.43%
Education and Training37.81%
Entertainment and Events36.16%
Finance41.44%
Games29.88%
Government46.3%
Health and Fitness41.23%
Higher Education44.74%
Hobbies36.52%
Home and Garden38.26%
Information Technology (IT)33.53%
Insurance39.32%
Legal39.26%
Manufacturing41.07%
Marketing and Advertising38.26%
Coaching38.27%
Media40.67%
Media and Publishing33.35%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare46.29%
Music and Musicians38.98%
Non-profit42.43%
Online Courses and Coaching33.84%
Other36.26%
Photo and Video42.53%
Politics39.9%
Public Relations35.89%
Publishing Company40.85%
Real Estate41.59%
Recruitment and Staffing44.25%
Religion41.19%
Restaurant40.88%
Retail40.56%
Software and Web Apps39.77%
Sports39.29%
Telecommunications39.13%
Travel and Transportation39.36%

How To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Okay, so now that you know what open rate you should aim for, how can you reach it?

Here’s some advice for increasing your open rates:

Pay Attention to Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is the ability of an email to reach the subscriber’s inbox.

It’s measured by a metric called the deliverability rate which shows the percentage of emails sent that are delivered to the recipient.

For example, if your deliverability rate is 97%, it means that if you send an email to 100 subscribers, it will reach 97 of them.

However, something to keep in mind here is that just because it reaches your subscribers in theory, it doesn’t mean that it reaches them in practice. Why?

Because most people only check emails that land in their inboxes as opposed to spam, promotions, social, or other folders.

So the real question is what percentage of the email you send lands in the recipients’ inboxes?

While email marketing service providers don’t track that, you can improve your chances of reaching the inbox by:

  • Choosing a reputable email marketing service provider. You want to go with established companies that have a high email deliverability rate that’s above 95%.
  • Guarding your reputation as a sender. Never add people to your email list without their permission, never send your subscribers spam, and be careful with your email frequency. Also, make sure to provide an easy way to unsubscribe. Don’t give anyone a reason to mark your emails as spam!
  • Asking people to reply to your welcome email. When someone subscribes to your email list, send them a welcome email and ask them to reply to it with “hi”. This will indicate to their email service provider that you are a legit sender whose emails are welcome.

Prune Your Email List

As your email list grows, you will inevitably accumulate inactive subscribers.

These are the people who are on your email list but don’t open your emails anymore.

We recommend implementing this automation to make sure that you regularly prune those inactive subscribers:

  1. When someone hasn’t opened your emails for 3 months, send them an email where you ask them if they want to continue receiving emails from you and provide a link that they need to click in order to confirm that.
  2. If they click that link and therefore confirm that they indeed want to continue receiving emails from you, keep them on your email list.
  3. If they don’t open the email at all or open it but don’t confirm that they want to continue receiving emails from you, unsubscribe them and remove them from your email list.

Keep in mind that email list size is a vanity metric so you shouldn’t be afraid to remove inactive subscribers. What’s the point of having them on your email list if they aren’t opening your emails?

Use Email Segmentation

Email segmentation allows you to create various subscriber segments based on:

  • Location.
  • Traffic source
  • Interactions with your emails.
  • Browsing history.
  • Purchase history.

…etc.

Then, if you have something that is relevant to some subscribers but not others, you can email just that segment instead of emailing your entire email list.

We recommend using email segmentation to ensure that your emails are always as relevant as possible so that your subscribers would continue opening them.

Improve Your Subject Lines

Your subject line is what determines whether or not the subscriber will open your email once it lands in their inbox.

There are several approaches to creating compelling subject lines:

  • Benefit-driven subject lines convey what’s in it for the subscriber.
  • Curiosity-driven subject lines pique the subscriber’s curiosity.
  • Pattern-interrupt subject lines that are so wacko that the subscriber can’t help but open the email just to see what it’s all about.

Whichever approach you choose, make sure that you give your subject lines the attention they deserve and make them as compelling as possible.

Add Value With Every Email

Finally, if you get someone to open your email, but that email turns out to be a let-down, they will be less likely to open your emails in the future.

And if this continues to happen, then eventually they will stop opening your emails altogether.

That’s why you need to focus on providing value with each and every email.

It’s the only way to keep your open rates high in the long run!

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So what are you waiting for?

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